Tuesday Health Talk: 6/10/08

Enjoy these great health posts from today’s edition of Tuesday Health Talk!

McDonalds pulled tomatoes from sandwiches served in the United States on Monday amid a nationwide Salmonella outbreak. The move came two days after the Food and Drug Administration warned restaurants and retailers not to serve round or Roma tomatoes unless they were grown in areas untouched by the outbreak. McDonald’s said it was imposing a total ban on those types of tomatoes as a precautionary measure. The chain said it had received no reports of illness among its customers.

Salmonella food poisoning first linked to uncooked tomatoes has spread to 16 states, federal health officials said Saturday. Investigations by the Texas and New Mexico Departments of Health and the U.S. Indian Health Service have tied 56 cases in Texas and 55 in New Mexico to raw, uncooked, tomatoes.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy is back home from brain cancer surgery with something he didn’t have before: lots of treatment options. Because his tumor was operable, the 76-year-old senator is a candidate for the most promising treatments traditional and experimental being used against his dire disease.

Microsoft Corp and Kaiser Permanente, the biggest U.S. health maintenance organization (HMO), are working on a patient information exchange pilot program to help give patients more control over their health records, The Wall Street Journal said on Monday.

Sure, exercise is good for your waistline, your heart, your bones but might it also help prevent addiction to drugs or alcohol? There are some tantalizing clues that physical activity might spur changes in the brain to do just that. Now the U.S. government is beginning a push for hard research to prove it.

The pace of life gets faster and faster, and people try to cram more and more into every minute of the day. As things get more hectic, sleep tends to get short shrift. It’s seen as wasted time, lost forever. “For healthy people, there’s a big temptation to voluntarily restrict sleep, to stay up an hour or two or get up an hour or two earlier,” said Dr. Greg Belenky, director of the Sleep and Performance Research Center at Washington State University Spokane. “But you’re really reducing your productivity and exposing yourself to risk,” Belenky added.